Folk Drama

Folk drama is a kind of oral folk creativity that unites word, action, song, dance, costume, and play before an audience; a syncretic spectacle rooted in rites. Folk drama includes ritual games and enactments (the wedding as a dramatized rite, the 'Goat,' the 'Malanka,' the 'bush-leading'), as well as folk plays proper that circulated in the oral tradition: 'Tsar Maximilian,' 'The Boat,' and satirical interludes. A special place is held by the vertep — the folk puppet theater on Christmas themes. Folk drama is characterized by improvisation, typical mask-characters, and the combination of the sacred and the comic. It became one of the sources of the professional Ukrainian theater — from the school drama and interludes of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy to the 'theater of the coryphaei' of Marko Kropyvnytsky and Ivan Karpenko-Kary. Ukrainian folk drama was studied by Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Mykola Vozniak, and Yosyp Fedas.